This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the “Love Takes Risks” conference on small presses at UEA in Norwich, and the announcement of the shortlist for this year’s Republic of Consciousness Prize. I was there to represent Nicholas John Turner’s Hang Him When He Is Not There, which was published by Splice last year and landed a spot on the longlist back in January. Ultimately, Hang Him didn’t make it through to the next round, but that’s okay; I was honoured just to have Splice represented during its first year of operations, and I also had a great time listening to the plenary session that preceded the shortlist announcement. That session featured the powerhouse trio of David Hayden, Eley Williams, and Chris Power in conversation — and my fingers were flying across the touchscreen as I tried to document it all on Twitter in real time. If you’re interested in following the threads I unspooled, start here and read to the end, then follow up here with a look at a part of the thread that somehow branched off from the first.

Adam Scovell’s Mothlight is one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. I’ve reviewed the novel for Splice, with a focus on the fascinations of its form:

It has been said that moths are drawn to burning candles because they confuse flames with the light of the moon. Moths, after all, use moonlight to navigate a path through darkness, but light from elsewhere reliably drags them off-course. The result is a split in perceptions. From the moth’s perspective, the path remains direct although the destination is unreachable: the creature believes itself to be flying straight on towards its goal, even as it fails to close the remaining distance. From the perspective of an observer, however, the moth has been snared into a spiral with no way to break free; it flutters around the flame in a way that makes a misleading light the centre of an experience, surveying the object of its desire continually from a distance. In his début novel, Mothlight, Adam Scovell has written a book that shadows the movements of the captive moth. Scovell’s narrator takes aim at a very particular objective, albeit one that is hazily conceived, only to end up whirling around in circles, unable to seize his prize, fixating on an ideal in a frenzied pursuit that robs him of his sanity.

What about the prose style, and the way it contributes to the tone in conjunction with imagery and the narratorial perspective? There’s clearly a bit of W.G. Sebald in there, maybe some Teju Cole, but were there other models for Thomas’ voice? Where did it come from?

I think the majority of the voice techniques come from European fiction of the post-war period. Sebald was and always will be the biggest influence on my writing, but the main voice that dictated the OCD recursions in Mothlight was Thomas Bernhard. I don’t think I’d have the bottle to write fiction the way I do without having read him, and he’s probably the closest a writer has come to recreating my own “head voice”. In particular, the way Bernhard uses repetition to lock you into the tics and worries of his narrators is really quite astounding, and you can definitely see what Sebald took from his writing as well. Teju Cole was another influence, generally. I love how he is building on the use of the photographs within prose, as well as his mental and physical meanderings. I loved Open City, and reading one of his essays on Sebald from Known and Strange Things whilst in Strasbourg created one of the most uncanny reading moments of my life, though I won’t say why.

Alan Trotter’s Muscle takes an interesting approach to dismantling the notion of literary genres — specifically the hardboiled mystery genre — and although it gets off to an admirable start, in the end the genre always wins. That’s basically the case I make in my latest review for Splice:

By now you’ve probably got the sense that Muscle is a rollicking good time, and you’d be right — up to a point. It is the language, above all, that animates Trotter’s novel, and not only the language of Box’s narration but also the dialogue of other characters who repurpose the kitschy ease of pulp noir. A woman who looks like a potential femme fatale, for instance, is explicitly designated as a generic type, as “the love interest” of a private investigator. And the shamus, for his part, speaks like the ideal of the hardboiled hero, telling his “love interest” not to worry, calling her “kid”, and issuing Box and ______ with a warning that properly belongs in a speech balloon from a comic book: “You two so much as wag your tails too hard and there’s lead coming back through this door for you to fetch.” But then, as will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to read a copy of Black Mask from cover to cover, there’s only so much buoyancy that a story can take from even this entertaining language, and beyond that point there’s a real struggle for fresh air.

The tolerance threshold is four pages. Read just the first four pages of Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? and you’ll know the terms on which to press forward. Those pages belong to a potent work of short prose entitled ‘Bones’. It’s not exactly a story, though it relates a narrative spanning a lifetime. It’s not exactly an essay, though it is informative, associative, and contemplative. It’s tough to read, describing events that are ghoulish and visceral and awfully sad, and yet its sentences have a delicacy of tone which alleviates the work as a whole, lightening the burden on the reader. So, then, what’s the implication of that title? Given that Young’s raw material is self-evidently hard to bear, the question “Can you tolerate this?” seems calculated to prompt readers to consider what makes it bearable. If the subject of ‘Bones’ tests one’s tolerance, Young’s style — her delivery of the material — does a lot of heavy lifting to raise one’s tolerance threshold. Four pages, that’s all it takes. Four pages, and you’ll see that the style inserts an extra word at the end of the title: the default answer to the question is “no”, but foreground Young’s way of approaching her subject and ask again — “Can you tolerate this now?” — and the answer evolves.

[T]here are great writers (even within a literary tradition that prizes style over plot) who are bad or inconsistent stylists. … Style is not an “element” [of literature]. Visual narratives, spoken narratives, and written narratives are not the same. There are great writers who are bad or inconsistent stylists… especially in genres outside the literary. … Writing can do many things beyond rhetorical mastery (style). Fiction can be deeply affective or ideational without rhetorical complexity. Science fiction is arguably conceptually more complex than much lit fic, though stylistically less masterful. Many options for greatness… [and no need for] a subordination of all categories to “the writer’s language effects,” which strikes me as an attenuation of the possibilities for literature — just as a narrow focus on only narrative forms is.

Now, with Philip K. Dick being floated as an exemplar of a “great” writer who is also a terrible stylist, I’ve waded in with some rough thoughts of my own. Continue reading →

Here’s another double-take. Earlier this week, at Splice, I reviewed Sam Thompson’s new novel, Jott, which depicts a lightly fictionalised version of Samuel Beckett and even includes fragments of pastiche representing the fictionalised Beckett’s outpourings:

[But] Jott… is really a novel whose various elements — the characters and their situations, as well as styles of thought and expression — are assembled in an array of delicate equipoises and counterpositions. At its heart is the dynamic of antagonism and conciliation between two oppositional personalities. Arthur is a buttoned-down young man so polite and cerebral, so emotionally distant and contained, that he remains ashamed of himself for the secret he harbours: he is “two months from his thirtieth birthday” and he has never had “a sexual experience”. Louis, conversely, is puerile and lascivious, deflationary and iconoclastic, a provocateur “burning with conviction to the fingertips, living by a hunger that would not be satisfied, incapable of doing a dull or conventional thing”.

Then, later in the week, I spoke to Thompson about the place of this type of writing in the current literary landscape:

Were you conscious of contributing to a minor trend in contemporary literature? Jo Baker fictionalised Beckett in A Country Road, A Tree (2016), and a version of Beckett appeared again in Alex Pheby’s Lucia (2018). What’s your response to writing on a similar wavelength to these books?

You know all those ‘punk’ genres in SF — cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk and so on? I like that terminology because it captures how fiction can take a certain setting, with its associated sensibility, paraphernalia and preoccupations, and work it up into an aesthetic which becomes an end in itself. Writing Jott felt that way to me. The whole business of writing á clef was really just an excuse to get inside an atmosphere and invent a world. So maybe that’s the nature of the kinship with A Country Road, A Tree and Lucia — I wasn’t conscious in advance of joining in a trend, but maybe Jott belongs to the micro-genre of Beckettpunk.

Stan Lee died today. His wasn’t exactly an untimely death, but it can’t not affect a person like me. Lee was the earliest and largest of my gods. The other two, from the start, were Stanley Kubrick and Roger Ebert. That probably sounds strange, but there it is; no denying that they were the first three to really open my interest in the capacities of the imagination. I owe a lot to him and his work. That’s not to downplay the importance of his best artistic collaborators (Schuster, Ditko) or the writers who took the baton from him and did better things (Claremont, Miller, Gerry Conway, Peter David). But the originating power lies with him. Continue reading →